ShitBrit (shite return)

a/k/a the eternal returns of shite

John Harris, in this piece on the Return of Boys Wonder - gigging action at the 100 Club and a new compilation -  advances the thesis that they were BritPop avant la lettre:

"All this might suggest a lost classic from the mid-1990s, and the gaudy wonders of Britpop. But 'Goodbye Jimmy Dean' was actually by Boys Wonder, a visionary band whose star rose and fell between 1986 and 1988. They were about eight years ahead of their time, and in retrospect, their chronically awkward fit with their era was probably always going to be their undoing. But while they lasted, they were great. In 1987, I saw them performing on the Channel 4 comedy show Saturday Live, swaggeringly delivering another three-minute manifesto titled 'Shine on Me' I was smitten, but given their large-scale blanking by the music press (and the fact that the world wide web had yet to be invented), I was left wondering what on earth had happened to them."

Harris singles out as personally epochal the very TV performance that more than any other got me thinking about ShitBrit - I'd be obsessively rewatching this clip, wondering how on earth such obvious bollocks got so far (contrary to Harris, they did get a lot of music paper support)

That Ben Elton intro really adds savor to the shite, don't it!

Farce returns as history

"Some of their original stage outfits feature in Outlaws, a new exhibition centred on “fashion renegades of 80s London” at the capital’s Fashion and Textile Museum. But the main event is a brilliant new Boys Wonder anthology titled Question Everything, most of which has never been heard before."

The motley composition of the band - singer Ben Addison "and  his twin brother, Scott, were art-school alumni from south-east London, who cut their musical teeth as the drummer and bassist with a quartet called Brigandage (“the Sex Pistols with a female singer,” he says), in the vanguard of a short-lived genre known as Positive Punk....  guitarist Graham Jones, who was about to exit the wreckage of early 1980s pop sensations Haircut 100"  - highlights a thing I am fascinated by: the opportunism of bands. 

Sometimes the band sticks together and keeps it name but hops from style to style, across the unfolding of several pop eras. 

Sometimes the band will rename itself over this same process of changing with the times, adjusting to nomenclative fashions .

And then sometimes the bands keep disintegrating but the players reappear in new agglomerations with discards from other bands that didn't make it. The player will have adjusted their look and their playing style to whatever is happening, in hopes that this will finally propel them to fame. 

So many examples... I remember NME mocking Gary Tibbs in the early '80s with a slideshow of his changing looks in different bands - Vibrators, Roxy Music, Adam and the Ants (and subsequently several more). 

I suppose that fits more the journeyman, working-musician archetype perhaps. 

More telling is the makeovers done by prime movers who keep moving with the times. E.g. 

BritShit Emeritus Gareth Sager - The Pop Group, Rip Rig and Panic, Head. 

Or Bebop Deluxe / Red Noise / Bill Nelson in his synthpop phase.

Or Cafe Society / Tom Robinson Band / Sector 27 / Tom Robinson

Yet more proof here of the persistence and aesthetic flexibility of most musicians, with what came after the fizzle of Boys Wonder:

" By the mid-90s, the Addison twins had formed Corduroy, a quartet signed to the Acid Jazz label who retained a London-centric sense of place, but mixed it up with everything from 60s film soundtracks (their first two albums were largely instrumental) to Steely Dan." 

Their image is very different too:

Yes the chap with the glasses and goatee - and the receding hairline - I believe that is the formerly big-eyebrowed frontchap of Boys Wonder.

                                                The missing stink between James Taylor Quartet and the Propellerheads.

Looking good is fine, is a duty for bands, yes yes... but sometimes you wonder whether the BritShitters didn't overbalance their energy output towards clothes and hair rather than sound:

“Ben would be sitting over in the corner with a pad and paper and he’d be drawing outfits. Our girlfriends were going to fashion college, so some of them could create the items of clothing that Ben was drawing.... “We would sit down together and watch the Who do My Generation on [1960’s US TV staple] The Smothers Brothers show,” says Addison. “The [Pistols’] God Save the Queen video. Untold Bowie stuff. Roxy, especially with the shoulder pads and Brian Eno’s feathers. Tom Jones when he was at his most gyratable, as it were. And pre-fat Elvis.”

".... A visual breakthrough came with the Addisons’ bowl-contoured haircuts, which defied the 80s’ tyranny of quiffs. “A good friend of ours called Andrew McLaughlin was a rising star within Vidal Sassoon,” says Addison. “He turned up one night at the Greenwich theatre bar, which was one of our favourite hangouts, with this bleached, completely severe fringe, like Henry V. He looked like something out of black and white Doctor Who. I said, ‘Fucking hell, Andrew – that is the bomb. This is what we’re going to do.’” Ben combined his new barnet with eyebrows almost comically thickened with an eye-pencil, and instantly had his signature look."

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Last time the topic of ShitBrit came around, a correspondent asked me to talk candidly in subsequent posts (of which they weren't any, although I'd planned to) about the complicity of the music papers - specifically Melody Maker - in elevating all this shite, things like the New Wave of New Wave. Eyewitness accounts of editorial meetings etc. This is what I replied: 

I don’t know if I remember much about the editorial meetings and how things got to be covered

Most of the ShitBrit, there was either genuine enthusiasm from a writer (failings of taste on the part of journos is as much a generative cause of ShitBrit as it is on the audience level). 

Or the attitude was more ‘there’s a buzz about this band, we need to cover it’.  So someone would be dispatched to do that.  I’m not sure we had any actual Levellers fans, for instance, but they needed to be covered, was the thinking

In terms of scenes, Romo was definitely a manifesto looking for an actual movement of good bands, but it was a great manifesto – just a bit premature. If they’d done it around the time of electroclash they would have had a slightly more plausible set of candidates to do the rhetorical push around – if still not quite substance of the enduring kind.

It was certainly a lot better as a concept / rhetoric that the things NME was coming up with (Fraggle Rock, was that one?).

Kingmaker was given a big push by NME. As was Cud.  

MM was not unguilty in covering this type o’shite but it was not our core. I have no idea what those groups sound like – post-Wonderstuff?

New Wave of New Wave – did we start that? Or NME? Can’t remember but yes unadulterated shite. Wasn’t there a band called Snuff? They were probably solid enough, if boring. But SMASH and These Animal Men – typical Brit all mouth no trouser bizniz. 

Manics eventually worked up sufficient substance to pass muster, but lagged far behind their own rhetoric.  The Manics seem to have been some kind of intellectual / militancy lifeline for people a generation below me, especially those living out in the sticks…    the Manics interviews really were their great contribution, their art form (an extension of what Morrissey did, where it was a big part of his job – to be interviewed, to be a provocateur). With the total innovation of having Richie (and Nicky to lesser extent) as the specialized function of discourse – a division of labor, all the musical graft and stolid craftmanship in the singer and drummer, all the attitude (and book reading) in the other two.  

I think we are secretly fond of all this BritShit - it has that nostalgia power now. I almost regret living outside the UK during the second half of the ‘90s, it would have sharpened the blade of my fury even keener, because one would inevitably end up watching Jools Holland every week for want of nothing to do....